Mail clients

Trojan

Hey guys,

Some newbieish (hmm, ponders, should that be newbish?) questions!

I gotta switch mail clients, so I'm looking for something half decent.

Some of the guys in my group have recommended mutt, which is a text based client, but apparently very configurable.
I've used pine and wasn't too unpleased, but I don't think it's good enough for work mail where I have maybe 3K mails a month or something like that, I keep about 1/3 of the messages, so sorting is real important.

C22 mentioned exmh, that's an interface to the mh client? I don't know exactly how that works, can anyone give a quick overview?

The other thing I'm used to, from a mail perspective, is that it's the mail client that sorts incoming mail ... why is there a package called procmail, and why would you need to use it? To send mail to a single account to different accounts based on contents?

cheers,
Al.

ecksor

I'd recommend mutt. You can set which way you want mail to be sorted in your .muttrc (threaded, received date, order received etc). It's also convenient to save different people's mail into different mailboxes etc.

Procmail is for processing mail when it's delivered. I use it for sorting different mailing lists into their appropriate mailboxes, but there is a lot more that can be done with it, such as forward mails with certain subjects or from certain people to other accounts etc. You could do that with mutt manually, but would be a pain. As for why is it done with procmail and not the mail client, well procmail can be called from whatever is delivering mail. Your admin can set it to be used automatically when your system gets mail if you are reading it locally, or your .fetchmailrc can call it if you are getting mail from a pop3 server with fetchmail, or you can invoke it from your .forward file. So, having it as a separate tool makes a lot of sense.

Trojan

Originally posted by X_OR
I'd recommend mutt. You can set which way you want mail to be sorted in your .muttrc (threaded, received date, order received etc). It's also convenient to save different people's mail into different mailboxes etc.

Procmail is for processing mail when it's delivered. I use it for sorting different mailing lists into their appropriate mailboxes, but there is a lot more that can be done with it, such as forward mails with certain subjects or from certain people to other accounts etc. You could do that with mutt manually, but would be a pain. As for why is it done with procmail and not the mail client, well procmail can be called from whatever is delivering mail. Your admin can set it to be used automatically when your system gets mail if you are reading it locally, or your .fetchmailrc can call it if you are getting mail from a pop3 server with fetchmail, or you can invoke it from your .forward file. So, having it as a separate tool makes a lot of sense.

Thanks XOR... very helpful... I'll prolly have a look at mutt so... can you post excerpts from your .muttrc for us to have a look at?

Cheers,
Al.